Tea party response to Obama hits soft tones

He talked about embracing diversity, welcoming immigrants and teamwork. At one point, he spoke in Spanish.

Rep. Curt Clawson didn’t give a typical tea party speech.

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The Florida Republican delivered the annual tea party response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, and he offered significant contrasts with the Obama administration on major policy areas.

He said the U.S. should repeal and replace Obamacare — “We can do better, y’all,” he quipped. He called for small business and corporate taxes to be cut in half. He asked for the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, demanded that the U.S. secure its borders and said government spending and taxation should be dramatically scaled back.

But Clawson took a softer tone than expected for an address from the tea party, an insurgent movement that has rankled Democrats and the GOP establishment by urging minimal legislative compromise. (Tea party leaders began offering their own rebuttal to the president’s speech in 2011.)

In perhaps the most striking moment of the speech, the congressman broke into Spanish to discuss immigration, stressing that newcomers who follow the laws are “all welcome with us.”

“We are all equal, of course,” he continued in Spanish. “Our house is your house.”

Clawson hearkened back to his college basketball career at Purdue University to argue for a federal government guided by teamwork, not division. “At Purdue, our biggest challenge was not the other team,” he said. “It was in our own locker room. To win – we had to learn to work together.”

The congressman’s speech was light on specifics. He railed against big government but declined to mention specific programs other than the Affordable Care Act. He didn’t address hot-button social issues such as same-sex marriage or abortion.

Instead, Clawson tried to frame tea party values as mainstream American values. After briefly addressing equal opportunity and economic freedom, he said: “It’s really odd to me that these basic principles have somehow become ‘outsider’ — or even radical views — as some suggest.”

Before the speech, Clawson looked loose, offering smiles and a fist pump to people off-camera.

Unlike Obama or Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who delivered the official Republican response, Clawson gave his speech seated. He wore a navy suit, blue shirt and orange striped tie. He spoke directly after Ernst’s speech, which followed Obama’s.

Clawson was one of 25 Republican representatives not to vote to reelect John Boehner as House speaker. He voted instead for Sen. Rand Paul, adding in a statement that the Kentucky Republican is a “fellow outsider” and that Boehner has “disappointed” him for cutting bipartisan budget deals.

The congressman won a special election in June for Florida’s 19th congressional district to replace Trey Radel, who resigned after pleading guilty to drug possession.

In an interview with POLITICO earlier Tuesday, Tea Party Express Executive Director Taylor Budowich dismissed concerns that the tea party response would exacerbate rifts between the establishment and conservative wings of the Republican Party.

Budowich also praised Ernst, a darling among grassroots conservatives and whom the Tea Party Express endorsed in the 2014 Senate primary.

“I would say there’s going to be two tea party responses,” Budowich said, in a nod to Ernst’s tea party ties.